A Fresh Look at Climate Change

Recently The Economist (2013a), a prominent journalistic advocate of strong policies to control CO2 emissions, expressed their puzzlement on the absence of warming over the last 15 years. They observed that this flat period of global average temperature occurred despite that CO2 emissions from human sources continued at an increased rate. The total human-produced CO2 emissions in that period of flat temperatures represent a quarter of all such emissions ever produced. The standard climate models, such as those used by the United Nation’s International Panel on Climate Change (UN IPCC), anticipated that such massive CO2 increases should have caused continuing increases in average global temperatures. The Economist noted that observed global average temperature is now at the lowest end of the predicted range, and that if the present trend continues, the actual temperatures will soon be below even the lowest forecasts. Most recently, Fyfe, Gillett, and Zwiers (2013) demonstrated that the current climate models have experienced a systematic failure—a finding very similar to Knappenberger and Michaels (2013). Given the large difference of observed data from the forecasts that underlie much current policy, it is timely to ask if the climate debates are addressing the right questions. Comparison of forecasts to observations is the right way to start asking. If the forecasts used to set policy are not accurate, then policies based on those forecasts warrant